Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2444

Carbon of letter to Heath from grandson Irvan T. O’Connell at Harvard Law School, Story 102, Cambridge 38, Massachusetts, or 76 Mt. Auburn Street

March 6, 1956

 

 

 

Dear Popdaddy,

 

     I imagine that you must have heard by now that Mother decided to turn around at Calcutta and retrace her steps. So she did not go to New Delhi. When I heard that I cabled her at Singapore that you had sent her money care of the Consul at Delhi. She passed through Singapore on her way to Java and Bali again before that cable reached her there. She is due back in Singapore about now. I imagine that she can have the funds transferred to her in Singapore. In any case you have probably taken steps in this matter by now. Sorry, if I have put you to inconvenience in this, as I may well have.

 

     Popdaddy, I’m afraid I write my letters after I have done my law assignment for the night, and that is generally quite late at night. I finally get tired studying law and start to go to bed, but I cannot get to sleep, so I write a letter. But there is not much left of me by that time that writes the letter.

 

     Now that Spring is all but here I presume you-all are about to start for Florida. Well, stop by and say hello to Daddy for me. On the other hand, if you are staying in New York come on up and see me. During March and April I am free as I will ever be up here. My telephone no. is KIrkland 7-5682. Between twelve thirty and one at night is probably the best time to reach me. I am home from studying then and just about getting into bed.

 

     In a recent issue of “Freeman” there is an article by Von Mises on the Industrial Revolution. Do not object because I use the word even “Industrial Revolution.” I use it as a “term of art” only. He examines the myth connected with that phrase, to wit: that it brought misery and slums to a happy rural society. I suppose people think that because they are so ignorant of the conditions of rural England before the Industrial Revolution. They think the great mass of the people then were “Yeoman Farmers.” And the great mass of the people may have been just that, whatever a “yeoman farmer” is. But there were also masses of people who did not have a place in that society. For example: “Hark, hark the dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to town.” It was the people for whom there was no place in the country who went to work in the mills. It was better working in the mills than wandering about the countryside. If it had not been better they would have gone back to wandering.

     Once they became employees their conditions improved continuously. I think that can be proven by documentary evidence. Yet by the time of Victoria well-meaning people were   shocked and disturbed by the misery of the working men. Yet no one was shocked by misery that was much worse than this in Hogarth’s day, a century before. It was the standards of the   educated people that had changed, again because of the increasing prosperity, and living conditions of the working men that had seemed inevitable and natural to the educated in the Eighteenth Century seemed atrocious in the nineteenth.

     Now how did I get involved in all that? I’m supposed to be thinking about covenants that run with the land. Now I am going to bed.

     Mother’s address during all March is: c/o Miss Gladys Burkhart, 298 Silom Road, Bangkok, Thailand.

    

Love to you both,

     /s/ Irvan